The Political Animal, written and read by Jeremy Paxman (6hrs, Penguin, £12.95)

Playground of jesters, paradise of fools was Lord Curzon's description of the House of Commons. In a letter to President Kennedy, JK Galbraith wrote: "Politics is not the art of the possible, it's the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." Disraeli went further, observing that there was no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable, for in politics there is no honour.

There must be someone out there with a good word to say about politicians; but if there is, Jeremy Paxman wasn't listening. You could argue that having interviewed every sort of political animal for Newsnight he has heard more than enough to convince him that politics is a mug's game and with few exceptions, politicians deserve to be mugged.

There's the Tory hopeful who, when asked if he would be moving into the constituency, replied that he would probably hunt over it. There's Alan Milburn, whose qualifications to take charge of the 1.1m employees of the DHSS were that he once helped to run a leftwing bookshop in Newcastle called Days of Hope (the locals called it Haze of Dope). Then there are the Young Conservatives who held a poll to see who would be the most popular replacement if Mrs Thatcher were run down by a bus. The winner by a mile was the bus driver. Jokey anecdotes apart there is a serious and well-argued message underlining the book, namely: do politicians really matter any more? Not really.

What made Matthew Parris a cut above other Parliamentary sketch writers was his inside information (for seven years he was Tory MP for Derbyshire), but his autobiography is far more than a gamekeeper turned poacher exercise. It's a full, frank and doubtless cathartic account of his personal life - nothing wrong with that except that I'd prefer Parris the clear-sighted, scalpel-wielding observer of the Westminster pantomime to Parris the tormented closet cruiser. "There's something not quite right about that boy," mused Mrs Thatcher which may just mean she didn't understand him; he's a complex character, both caring and conceited, but in the end I found myself both admiring and liking him a lot.